Philosophy has undergone a radical change. Reality is back on the table, in a different, strange and sometimes threatening (to humans) way. This change comes after two hundred years of consensus, a consensus that philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism”: the supposition that humans can only think reality as it is correlated to them. This thought has affected everything, from Kant through deconstruction.

In this class we shall survey the bracing new thought that goes under the name speculative realism, and in particular, its feisty subset, object-oriented ontology. This new thinking now affects areas as diverse as ecology, dance, sculpture, computer games, architecture, art criticism, media theory, design and geography. It will soon be making a strong impact in literary studies with a special issue of New Literary History devoted to object-oriented ontology (OOO). It has already had a big impact in medieval literary studies, with scholars such as Eileen Joy and Jeffrey Cohen spearheading the way.

This new philosophy movement is intertwined with new media. The journal Speculations is one of a number of free online publications in speculative realism. Many texts and talks are available as blog posts and in other online media.

Speculative realism is powerfully congruent with the emerging ecological crisis, since it tries to think reality outside the human–world correlate.

Tim Morton is one of the four core exponents of the subset known as OOO.

Requirements: one presentation, three short papers (1000 words each), topics to be decided between teacher and student. They could be modular (work towards two or three conference papers or single essay), or not. Presentation: 15 minutes on one text: introductory, raising questions (don't have to answer questions!).

Thanks to a very generous deal with Rice, I'm able to sell my house in Davis at a very low price, about $30 000 below the current asking price. It's three bedrooms, two bathrooms, on a 5000 square foot lot. Two huge landscaped gardens, deck in the front, pergola in back, with about fourteen trees, lawn, circular path, and a fountain and pool. The front garden has an awesome sloping dry creek bed and lemon tree, Japanese maple, and myrtle (among lots of other things). Very high ceilings throughout, build by the guy who designed it, who then lived in it. Much storage space, two car garage, huge car port, etc. Belongs to Stonegate which means you get access to the country club, massive swimming pools, tennis, barbecues etc.

I'm going to sell it for $360 000. You can contact Martha Mansell at Lyon Real Estate: 530 574-2003.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Marina Zurkow has excelled herself with this exhibition at DiverseWorks Artspace, which was very kindly opened early for me on my final day in Houston yesterday.

Necrocracy is oil, about oil. Like medieval flags in a banqueting hall you are greeted in the main hall by a host of gigantic banners made of a durable plastic flag material. They depict the things made of oil, which are many, strange and various.

Just outside the hall, these rather disturbingly short beings in yellow fluorescent hazard suits and black visors greet you. Are they aliens? Mutated future humans? Children? Children aliens? And so on.

Right inside, an animation depicts a friendly carbon atom who introduces himself as such, to be joined by a growingly overwhelming chorus of colleague atoms. The sound of this crew is quite quite threatening.

In an antechapel like space to the side, rows of car seats welcome you to sit and watch plastic bags ascending into wherever from a pool of oil, or a tar sand, or a polluted pond, or a pit of death, and so forth. Mournful ambient electronica washes around this space.

Ecology without Nature sits along with my essay “The Mesh” and various other texts in another side room, which includes various kinds of textured plastic.

In a space off to the side, a related piece takes you on a dizzying journey through the soil and rock as you join an animated drill bit. The child–aliens beckon you to watch the videos which are embedded in reflective cubes that hang from the ceiling. A kaleidoscopic journey through Earth ensues.

There are so many other wonders and horrors here that I'll have to stop for now but I took some pictures and will add them here soon.

The kind curators wanted to shoot photos of me looking at the work, which I was happy to do. But on exiting, I wished I'd posed for them with my head in my hands, unable to take it all in—cos that's how I felt. Zurkow has confronted us with reality and it's sad, ugly and outrageous—and yet since it's not a withering vilification, it works its way in under your skin very powerfully.

Rice Chapel. Reminds me of some of the more shocking hypoxic dreams I used to have. The gold is thousands of mosaic pieces, giving rise to a shimmering surface that is perfectly right for this environment.

Bill Benzon nudged me to write about the representative kicked off the floor of Congress for wearing a hoodie, in recognition of the racist assassination of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

It strikes me that what Žižek says about the burqa could easily be said of the hoodie. Let us assume that Martin's assassin was squirming with racist fantasies. What does the hoodie tell us about the real of these fantasies? (Rather than the absurd “He was asking for it because he wore a hoodie” stance of Geraldo.) What is scary about them is that they externalize (lapsing into Žižekian here) the impssible-real kernel of a person, the opacity of a person. We think there is a woman hidden under the burqa but the essence of woman as the opaque being—and I'd claim personhood in general—is what is seen, as if the burqa embodies the void under the mask, or the mask as void.

Or to put in OOO-ese, the hOOOdie evokes a fantasmic access to the withdrawn essence of the one who wears it. You are wearing your withdrawal on your sleeve, so to speak.

Now Congress is (small r) republican, which has to do with an Enlightenment aesthetic ideology of WYSIWYG: you wear your heart on your sleeve, not your withdrawal. You should appear (decently) naked, the real Man (deliberate capital M and deliberate gender). Consider that other republican artwork, the American front lawn: it must be spotless, shaved, clean, not walked on. The lawn is a kind of chew-and-show of the house: the house sticks out its long wide green tongue and shows you—nothing. A blank slate. But this blankness is different from the OO void (! Sunn O))) fans take note) of the hOOOdie. It's candor, openness, nothing to hide. The hOOOdie is hiding as such, concealment revealed.

The lawn and the open-faced hoodie-less congressperson must embody an objectified privacy, individualism, not uniqueness. Whereas the hOOOdie threatens to de-objectify in the most provocative way, by presenting de-objectification precisely as an OOO object whose inner depth is irreducibly strange.

The horrible greed and bad table manners of the doctors at this hotel continues apace. Sincere looking faces thrust themselves towards badly handled forkfuls of sausage, the lips protruding. Millionaires slurp coffee hunched like cornered animals over their ceramic cups. Demands to pace up and down faster and faster are made on the beleaguered waiters, who are visibly sweating with anxiety.

...in Houston today. About to meet the guy who's going to show me around. For some strange reason I have very good house finding karma. I think it's because I have no rigid expectations about what I want: I sort of let the thing call to me rather than imposing my idea on it. I've lived in I.M. Pei's building off of Washington Square, Oscar Wilde's old room at Magdalen, a 16th century cottage (Oxford) and an octagonal house (Boulder). And a silent paradise (Davis). Happily also my wife Kate said “Surprise me”: she is going to sell the house in Davis while I get one in Houston. Less chefs to spoil the broth that way. She is literally not wanting to see it until she shows up some time in July...

Joy Singh: acrobatic drumming. Unbelievable. He span with his head lower than his feet hitting the drum, among other things.

Antonia Minnecola: kathak dancer. Hussein's wife.

True story: my Mum's colleague at the day care center for at-risk children she managed in the mid-90s was Zakir Hussein's sister. Which meant he and his wife showed up with all kinds of incredible musicians and performed. She rightly saw the kids there as poor deprived white kids--the parents' racism prevented them from seeing she was very wealthy and cultured.

I'm going to miss our occasional very meaningful coffees when I leave Davis. We were just starting to tune quite seriously to one another's work. We're figuring out how to make this relationship work long distance.

Friday, March 23, 2012

My friend Carlyle, who descends from the Underwood typewriter people, gave me this bottle of 67 port ages ago. I'm having a glass of it to celebrate this endowed chair. It's the job of a lifetime. I'm in awe of the people there and I can't wait to start work.

Society is changing at an increasing speed and nobody knows where we are actually headed. Issues such as sustainability and biodiversity become intertwined with fairness and justice. How are we to build our common future?

Instead of plunging into the ‘green hype’ without further notice, Yes Naturally asks the question: What is natural, and who or what decides? Are human beings the only ones who have a say or do bacteria, atmospheres, trees, animals, things and computers play a role as well? Over seventy artists from different continents present a multitude of propositions for alternative ways to perceive the world. Famous pioneers and promising artists among whom Francis Alys, Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson, Fischli & Weiss, Susan Hiller, Peter Fend, Natalie Jeremijenko, Marjetica Portc and Superflex, show humor and decisiveness.

Unlooked for relationships and co-evolution between humans and the environment are central to our focus. Yes Naturally does not choose for ‘nature’ and against ‘technology’, but rather shows how innovations contribute to co-creation and partnerships between human and nonhuman entities.

Central statement

Yes Naturally is not about defeatism or getting lost in nostalgia, but rather envisions an urban future where nature and culture merge. Yes Naturally blends new materialism, object-relatedness and dark ecology in order to understand how humans and environments are intertwined. Yes Naturally is an affirmative approach to building partnerships with the world around us in a less delusional and less self-indulgent manner, opening our minds to the genuine otherness of what we call ‘nature’.

Objective of the Publication

A collection of essays will be published in conjunction with the Yes Naturally exhibition. The publication is intended to contribute to the current debate on ecology, biodiversity and sustainability by recognizing that a fundamental shift is paramount in how we perceive our surroundings and accordingly think and act. Cultural change will be necessary to reverse the destructive forces humans have precipitated.

From participating scholars and authors we expect propositions that suggest a less-anthropocentric worldview, which is both refreshing and challenging. Understanding how we co-evolve with technology is as central to this new understanding of ecological and social justice as is letting go of rooted notions about ‘nature’. Pedagogical contributions on ecoliteracy are welcomed as well. The selected articles may be seen as tools to understand our relationship with each other and with our surroundings in entirely different ways.

Situated and concrete We invite contributions that follow a bottom-up argumentation, informed by situated practices and which analyse concrete objects of study. The areas in which a more attentive perspective can make a difference are numerous. To pick just a few examples from many possibilities: Should we reconsider what it is that makes us human in a world inhabited by many intelligent non-human entities? Can innovative technology build bridges and restore a closer contact between humans and their surroundings? What do indigenous cultures teach us about co-evolution and interdependencies between language, culture, technology and nature? How can we learn from everyday practices and survival tactics of the marginalized and groups of concern in contemporary societies? And what would be the role of art in triggering attention to 'naturecultures' in scenarios for an inclusive future?

Practicalities
We would like to invite you to submit a proposal of 350 words. If accepted, we will contact you and make agreements for submitting a paper of approximately 3500 words.

Deadlines
– The deadline for submitting a paper proposal of 350 words is April 1, 2012
– The deadline to submit your paper of 3500 words is August 1, 2012
– The final deadline for edited and corrected submissions is October 1, 2012
– For questions please email Dennis Kerckhoffs dennis@ja-natuurlijk.com

It's going to be very hard to describe this so it may take a few posts. Here are some initial thoughts about Zakir Hussein's Masters of Percussion at the Mondavi Center, a beautiful concert hall here at UCD.

It was maniacal, demonic, hilarious. There were acrobat drummers that span around and upside down backwards, drumming. There was an Uzbeki drummer from Sacramento who was mindblowing and extraordinarily costumed. The clay pot player was a clay pot. A clay pot that was also a maniac.

I would like to thank you for downloading your 'How to read any poem' class. I am a mature
student taking my English Literature 'A' Level after an absence of twenty five years from
the classroom. Your class has helped bring so many aspects of poetry to life for me and
has been an invaluable resource each week. I am confident my high grades can be directly
attributed to all I have gained from listening to your class. A whole new understanding
of poetry has been opened up to me thanks to you (and Stephen Fry!).

In inviting sentient beings as guests, the bodhisattva, the practitioner in the Mahayana, has a constant sense of the impermanence of the relationship—the guest is going to leave. So we view this as an opportune time, and there is constant appreciation. Our guests come. We entertain them and relate with them. Afterward, the guests thank us, we say good-bye, and we go back to running our home. There is a sense of the preciousness and the impermanence of the relationship, a sense of that relationship being extremely special. Our guest may be our husband, our wife, or our child—everybody is the guest of everybody.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Thank you Deborah Elise White for suggesting a change to my previous. Rather than "the mother of all eco programs," Cary Wolfe and I shall create "the most unnatural of all eco programs." Be very afraid...

So this will be the title of my first class: Victorian Nonhumans. It's a graduate class and it will be from 2–5pm on a Wednesday. Why am I announcing it? I guess I'm just pretty darn excited to get stuck in.

I've accepted an endowed chair at Rice University. I'll be building a theory and philosophy school with Cary Wolfe--someone whom I hugely admire for several different reasons. It's exciting to think I'll be working alongside him.

Also, without doubt, we are going to create the mother of all eco graduate programs! So you should think of joining us if you are considering graduate school.

I'll also be building the Romanticism and nineteenth century studies program with my friends Helena Michie and Alexander Regier, and a host of incredible scholars who work in that field at Rice.

There is a very happening religion department in which I've been invited to teach, in particular with Anne Klein (Buddhism) and Jeffrey Kripal, who runs an institute called GEM (Gnosticism, Esotericism, Mysticism). He just published an excellent book on comics and the paranormal. They have a Contemplative Studies program, like Brown, which is right up my alley.

The Dean of Humanities at Rice is an amazingly creative and intelligent person and we're already getting on like a house on fire.

Rice in general has an optimal vibe: it's very well endowed and also very fresh and innovative.

I'm going there next week to buy a house. Houston is the fourth largest city in the USA and I'm hoping I can live a few blocks away from the Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection. It's been a while since I was in a city--last time was when I was visiting assistant prof at NYU.

Please join me next Friday, March 30 for a book signing event for Animals That Saw Me at the ICP Store.

Friday, March 30th, from 6 to 7:30 pm

at the International Center of Photography1133 Avenue of the Americas New York City

Animals That Saw Me was featured on several best photobooks of 2011 lists including: Alec Soth's Top 20 Photobooks of 2011, TIME's Best of 2011: The Photobooks We Loved, and Photo-Eye. Find out more about this project including links to recent press and reviews here.

A special edition of Animals That Saw Me which includes an original c-print is now available through The Ice Plant.

In other news, Salad Days: Volume 2 is finished and now available from Gottlund Verlag. Salad Days is a small edition (100 each) of 4 books featuring photographs taken in and around my high school during the early 90's. The books are being released over the course of a typical school year. Find more information here.

Please visit my recently updated website to see additional new projects and new edits.

In bodhisattva language, the definition of friend is the idea of a guest. There is a phrase, “inviting all sentient beings as your guests.” When we invite a guest, we have a sense of the importance of the relationship. Guests are usually fed specially cooked food and receive special hospitality. The life of a bodhisattva is relating with all sentient beings as guests. He or she is inviting everyone as a guest, constantly offering a feast.

Monday, March 12, 2012

...by If. When my brother's band Senser had me and him in it, this is what we really dug. The A&R man who first got into Senser was the manager of these guys, I think. Oh it takes me back to the hazy days of 1990...hand tinted memories...Mixed by Mr Monday, whom Nick the guitarist had just met in the VIP lounge at Earth... I think he must've ripped the whale sound off of a sample from Songs of the Humpback Whale that I'd used on a demo Nick gave him. It's exactly the same sound. I'm quite proud of that!

Sunday, March 11, 2012

He gave me a book of poems yesterday, The Sore Throat and Other Poems. Exactly right. This is my first encounter with them so I don't have many words. But they are very very strong. It's because they attend to rhythm and rhyme, in part, but also because they have a disturbing intensity of imagery, and they talk to you quite directly. I've never been called “moron” by a poem before...

“Fear of Nothing: Heidegger's Buddhism.” The Q&A was fabulous but because I didn't have the other panelists' permission (forgot to ask), I didn't record it. Great, great questioners. My friend Mark Payne introduces.

I've just begun listening to this series of podcasts, and I am enjoying them very much. I was wondering where I can go to read more about the "space" of poetry and/or theories of paratactic rhythm. Your explanation of these ideas are wonderful, and if you could point me in the direction of further reading I would really appreciate it.

Well that's very nice of you Michael. I don't know any texts that address parataxis in more detail than I've been doing but I'll keep my eye out.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Graham and I both happen to be writing for the same architecture journal and he has chosen to discuss The Ecological Thought. When I discovered OOO, right after it was published, it seemed so intuitively to fit with my sense of things.

Monday, March 5, 2012

production still, Mesocosm (Wink, TX), 2012, software-driven animationIn January 2011, DiverseWorks supported a two-week research trip for Zurkow to the Permian Basin. From Marfa to Midland, she met with geologists, naturalists, cattlemen, oilmen, and activists. She traversed the high southern plains of the Llano Estacado-the ecosystem stretching from Lubbock to the Edwards Plateau - a landscape so subtle most people call it The Big Empty. In the Permian Period 250 million years ago, the geological riches of the area were formed, as marine microorganisms accumulated in sediments on the floor of a vast saline sea. Over millions of years, the seas dried out, the landmass itself moved more than 2,000 miles into its present location and these creatures transmuted into hydrocarbons. In the past century, we have pumped over 100 billion barrels of oil and a hundred trillion cubic feet of gas from these Texas hydrocarbon reservoirs. The exhibit asks us to think about how we disturb, worship and are dominated by these long-dead beings: Necrocracy or the rule of the dead. - John PlueckerThe show is composed of seven new animated works and a labyrinth of fifty 10-foot high high banners of things made out of petroleum plastics - IV bags, flip flops, rubber chickens, artificial flowers, nylon umbrellas, gas masks, police riot shields, cell phones, car parts, condoms, diapers, and more. The animations – some video, some software driven – look at the petroleum-rich landscape of West Texas through a series of lenses: geological time, the larger ecosystem, and the interdependence of resources like water and oil.LOCATIONDiverseWorks Main Gallery and Aurora Picture Show's Flickerlounge1117 E. FreewayHouston, Texas 77002(map)Reception Friday, March 16, 6pm - 8pmGallery hours Wednesday - Saturday: 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM

I was happy to read this because it referenced the OOO idea of nonhuman agency. It also discussed the notion of an archive, which I'd been thinking about a bit recently with a view to OOO:

When you teach a poem in a literature class (which I've been doing frequently), you seem to have a choice between contextualizing the poem and close reading it. This is a silly choice. One reason why it's silly is because the context is often assumed to be within a narrow, ill defined human bandwidth: say 1600 to 1650 for a Shakespeare sonnet (tops).

But here you are, it's 2012 and you are also reading the poem. It has that context too. It's better, though more complex (and thus far more interesting and realistic) to think the poem as caught (and not caught) in many different networks of agents, from anthologies to Victorian readers to your classroom.

The Australian nature magazine Bare Essentials has asked me to write something on The Ecological Thought for them. And I just wrote an essay for the architectural journal Volume under the auspices of Liam young, the creative spark of the think tank Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. It's for an issue on ecology and guilt. I'm writing against guilt, and really against shame, and for sadness.

Please find attached
a notice announcing the pending launch of our new journal. Below is a general and ongoing
call for papers in email form.

It would be fantastic if you could circulate this
email far and wide (with the attachment where possible). At this stage we are in the
process of posting it to all of the relevant groups and networks of which we are aware,
but it has become very clear over the last few months that there are plenty of individual
scholars and even larger groups working in the Environmental Humanities that we have not
yet encountered.

As you will see in the attached document, we have set up a range of different options
for people to subscribe for notification of future issues of the journal.

Thank you
again for very much your involvement in this journal.

Thom and Debbie

****

Subject: Notice of new journal:
Environmental Humanities

****

Dear fellow environmental humanities scholars

We are pleased to announce the pending launch of a new open-access, interdisciplinary
journal: Environmental Humanities.

The attached document provides some basic information about the
journal, including the list of eminent scholars who have agreed to serve
on the Editorial Board.Further information about the journal can be found at our new
website: www.environmentalhumanities.org

We would like to take this opportunity to issue an open and ongoing
callforpapersfor
the journal. We aim to publish the best interdisciplinary scholarship
on the environment coming out of the humanities and we are confident
that the growing and vibrant international community of environmental
humanities scholars will support us in this effort.

There are various ways to keep up to date with relevant news and new
issues of the journal. Please see the 'About EH' page of the
website.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci